HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

Welcome, blog readers to this holiest of holy months,...October and in this hallowed, (pun intended), month sits the greatest of holidays,...Halloween. Now initially,...this Amazing Colossal Movie Art Blog was started with the original intent to explore the concept of turning my favorite live action films into their animated counterparts but sometimes,....a thing simply cannot be improved upon.
Case in point,...one of the smartest written and most clever shows to grace the after-school television screens of my early adolescence.

The Real Ghostbusters.

While the various episodes, (upwards of 130 and change, all said and done and once in syndication), varied in quality, a casualty of the early days of outsourcing to multiple studios, the writing was nothing short of cannon when it came to the look, feel and spirit of the original film.

Before it lost it's way and became Slimer and The Real Ghostbusters, I went back day after day for my daily dose of Peter, Ray, Egon, Winston, Janine and yes,...even Slimer. The Snarf of the series but he still had some very Belushi moments in the first two seasons.

So Above you see my tribute, (perhaps one of several this month if I can sneak the time), to one of the greatest shows of my toon-addicted generation and because I love seeing process,....I also love sharing process.

The image started as the loosest of loose thumbnail sketches that looked like I'd put the stylus in my left hand, closed my eyes and went for it.

I had a rough idea of where I wanted everybody and what I wanted them to be doing. Next up, came the tie-down.

The poses and proportions are tweaked and refined, Slimer is added and I begin to get fussy about the models. Next up, final cleanup line. I am a sucker for the kind of self-colored ink lines commonly practiced by Disney, Warners and Bluth so I always end up putting it in.

And here we see the final line before the final color pass. The "Happy Halloween" is added on the pumpkins and I throw a glow effect in once it's gone. I used a similar process for Slimer's ambient glow as well.

Hope you all enjoy! Perhaps I'll try another one soon! Now get to work on your costumes!

Doing the first thing last!

In the continuing saga of the Cheers office,....ironically, the last thing I ended up doing was the first thing I had conceived of and honestly was the entire scope of the project when I first considered doing it,....
The door.

That Iconic door was just about the apex of my grand plan. I thought,...."I'll just do up my door like the Cheers door!" and as the project blossomed into madness from there, the door fell by the wayside.

But as the project neared completion, the door turned into the cherry on the sundae, so to speak.

I got to work by digitally re-mastering the Cheers logo in Photoshop and having a local sign shop print it onto a sheet of acrylic. I then designed the framing insert to slip the acrylic into.

I then set about finding the proper boards to skin the door with. In dealing with the height and width restrictions of the door I found that six inch wide boards gave the door just about the right shape.

The Cheers door is considerably shorter and a tad wider but I had to work with what I had.

Now while leaving a hole in the wood to accommodate the deadbolt was easy, (though I still screwed it up), It was gonna be quite a different story to make puzzle pieces to account for the awkward industrial door handle and while I considered it, I took the lazy man's way out and simply left a gap in the wood. Because measuring something in one place, and crafting something for it in another can often be a tricky proposition.

It's amazing what a coat of Walnut stain can do.



And after three coats of polyurethane gloss, it was ready for a test-fit!

Here we see the skinning of the door in progress,....and the one board I screwed up. The hole I drilled was 1/2 in too low. :-(
Can you imagine if I'd tried to muddle my way around that handle? I never said I was a carpenter. I'm an artist who builds stuff! Occasionally I even use TOOLS!

OH! And in case you were wondering how I stuck the boards to the door? It's a magic little invention called industrial strength Velcro!

More to come!

Building the Cheers office: Part Two!

Test fitting the bar was a hoot! On a VERY warm Southern California day, I set aside the normal build day I might do for a "couple's hang out day" and a leisurely test fit of the bar on my VERY uneven backyard asphalt.
Now as I said in the first installment of this silly saga, the bar was designed to be modular and fit snugly around a raised, two-piece platform which would also serve to lock the post beams in place. The beams support the lightweight glass rail above and feature six beautiful track lighting fixtures that after an exhaustive search, are the closest, present-day equivalent to the ones they had in the show!

http://www.lightinguniverse.com/products/view.aspx?sku=270949&cid=t885

Here's a shot of it at night! Using low-key forty watt bulbs!

After a successful proof of concept, I was ready to move everything into the office! There was just one thing holding me up! The floor! Now with the floor, it  took me even longer to find a close match than the lighting fixtures did but I was finally able to find a very close match in some Armstrong cushion step, (who's stock number escapes me at the moment), and as luck would have it, my 12x14 foot piece came in right before a long weekend. Leaving me the perfect window to come in and set up the space like it was Christmas!

Here we see, (after trimming two feet off of the twelve), the floor in all it's reddish-tinged glory as I fine tune the fit over the carpet!

And the platform is in! With my Swain's desk in place and all my computer stuff back up and in place! I know it look like I don't have a lot of room but I really don't go far. Besides, I have the drop-down to keep me from sliding too far back, (in theory. Assuming I don't go for a tumble one day).

Reverse shot. You can see the fake paneling next to the door that will lock in the partition to come later.

With the platform in place, the bar goes around it like legos. The bar bodies sliding into the bases and the bar-tops sliding into the bodies and all working together to hold the posts in place. At the end of the day, the bar is all dialed in, posts in place and glass rails waiting to be mounted.

But MAN, was I tired! So off home I went, working over in my brain what I could get done the next day!

More to come!

Building the Cheers office: Part one!

It was a show about a "nice little neighborhood bar" that SET the bar for ensemble character comedy and has has every show that came after it trying to beat it at it's own game.
For me it was a point of pride that I was from the town where Cheers took place and when I first moved out here to LA it was my go-to show for an instant remedy for homesickness.
So last year when I found myself, for the first time in ten years, at a new job, in a new place, where I didn't know a lot of people, I was feeling a little,...well, a little unsure.
Like doing a tightrope walk without a net. But fortunately, the people I work for are all about embracing creativity and love to nurture the crazy creative streak.so when we were told, (inspired by some of the elaborate environments the creatives at Pixar transformed for their workspaces), that we were free to transform our offices in a similar fashion I thought,...."AH! Now THERE'S something that'll make me feel at home! I'll create a nest!"
I immediately thought a mini-pub would be a hoot of an idea To transform the office into a convivial outpost of warm conversation and laughs simply for the sake of creating an extraordinary environment. A second later I thought,..."NO! Wait!......Cheers."
Now for those that know, I love replicas and movie props of every kind and I've always pipe-dreamed about having a big ol' cellar someday that I could transform into a brick-by-brick perfect replica of the Cheers set because,....well, because why wouldn't I? :-)
So I thought,....that's it,....it'll be a little proof of concept! So I asked "Can I turn my office into Cheers?" Which turned several heads and raised several eyebrows and smirks. But good on em' for entertaining my crazy. So I went away and started researching. I dug out my old research photos and started researching things like flooring and light fixtures and bar stools and photographs.
In fact I spent SO much time on research I think people forgot I ever said i was gonna do this but as the pieces came together, the test builds began!

Here we see a rough test fit of the initial bar. The office was roughly 10x14 feet with a 9ft.ceiling so I designed the bar to sit in the rear left corner of the room.

My desk would sit on a raised platform, (so those on the stools and I would all roughly be at eye level), behind the bar and the posts would support a small lightweight glass rail above.

Here we see the gorgeous brass I ordered. Here in So-Cal we're lucky enough to have enough of the movie industry that you can get just about anything, especially for set design so when I found out that one of the metal places I go to out here has "bar parts" I made a beeline for it.

And finally, after a year of planning, I was able to test-fit the bar on one very hot summer night!

More to come in part two!

Huge-Ass cartoon crowd shot! Engagement photo take TWO!

Well,.....THIS one took me a while! :p

And I still don't think I'm quite done tweaking it but I think if I don't abandon this piece right now so my poor fiance' can finish getting our "save-the-date" cards printed up she may end up a widow before we even reach the altar. ;)

In other words,....she'll wring my neck.

But I figured we're only doing this once so why not do it with some style,......and style takes time. One cannot rush style,.....one must obey it. ;)

So in the continuing trend of our Who Framed Roger Rabbit inspired engagement photos comes,.....THE BIG ONE.

The Grand Central Station, (if you'll pardon the pun), of cartoon crowds for this series.

There's a whole frame load of about thirty or so characters who at any given point in time, occupy a special place in my heart. It's late so I'm not gonna enumerate the crowd just yet but while I may not have a prize to give, you will have my eternal respect if you can pick out some of the more obscure-er ones.
There's a few of them,.....and I still ran out of room for the penguin who cries ice cubes. ;)

Oh well,....we'll get him in the next one. ;)

The Engagement Photo! FIRST ONE!

I fell in love with my fiancé at Disneyland.

No joke. It was completely and totally unexpected but for two animation nerds, there couldn’t have been a more perfect first date.

It was in line for the Finding Nemo ride. By the time the ride was over, I realized she was the one. My heart knew before my head and my poor head’s been racing to catch up ever since.

You see, I must make a confession that perhaps only the closest to me may have ever suspected but no one ever really knew and that’s that I had given up. I’d given up on things like fairy tales and true love and magic,….all the things , ironically enough, that led me into my career of choice,…..animation.

As I hit thirty-seven with Forty rearing it’s ugly head, a kind of fateful pragmatism settled upon me. A sort of reverse midlife crisis where instead of breaking away from life, I was convinced that I’d missed it somehow. True love wasn’t always true and wasn’t always love. The type of happiness so lavishly rendered in the animated movies I loved was just "Hollywood Magic"and as I was getting ready to settle into, as Henry Higgins may have put it, “Confirmed old bachelorhood!” and trying to figure out exactly how I was feeling about my dubious new role, I turned around,….and there she was.

When I realized Kelly was the one I wanted to first shout “YAY!” and then ask, “Where the Hell have you been and couldn’t you have stopped to ask directions?” Truthfully, I could have been the one who was late but it’s funnier the other way ;)

So there we were, at the Magic Kingdom, with a jaded former dreamer who didn’t believe in wishing on stars contradicting himself by saying…”we’re both animation nerds so I guess we SHOULD go.”

So we went.

And it was the most perfect date ever. The weather was perfect, the crowds were thin, the lines were short! It was easy, it was effortless, I was more myself than I’d ever felt with anyone. It was just so,….different.

It just fit.

While waiting for Space Mountain to open up, we wandered into The House of Tomorrow, and shortly after that into the living room of tomorrow where a gigantic widescreen TV was playing the restored print of our favorite Disney film of all time,…Sleeping Beauty.

I’d never seen the film so big and beautiful! Every frame a work of art! Kelly and I had the place to ourselves. We settled in on the big leather couch and began to try to one up each other on the films trivia and animation knowledge in general. By the time we were done, we had drawn a crowd, including a few cast members who left there that day a little better informed about the medium that built the park they work in.

Continuing our tour of cloud nine “Disney-style”, we walked right into the Blue Bayou restaurant, without a reservation mind you, for a late dinner,…watching fireflies dance over the heads of the people in the boats,…sailing off to rougher waters and perhaps a glimpse of a pirate or two, (“dead men tell no tales!”).

We ended the night holding hands roaming the back alleys of Roger Rabbit’s Toontown wishing the real world was a lot more Toony and a lot less gloomy. After the lazy train ride back, we caught the fireworks from the parking lot before driving home as I realized that the Magic Kingdom had given me back my magic.

I couldn't have been more surprised,...or delighted.

When Kelly suggested we have our engagement photos taken in LA’s Union Station and in forties period costume, I knew I was marrying the right girl. We arrived with antique suitcases in hand and once we got a good look at ourselves I said, “My God, we look like we stepped out of Who Framed Roger Rabbit!”

We both smiled,….both thinking the same thing at the same time. So there were a few photos we selected for,…alterations.

Not sure how many I’m gonna do but this first one was our proof of concept and it’s a doozie.

When I proposed to Kelly, I told her I wanted to build her a fairy tale one dream at a time. I’m starting with these photos, because I am sensible of how rare it is. What we have together.

As rare as true magic, or fairy dust,….or wishing upon a star.

If you sat through this whole story,…I appreciate you taking the time, and I wish the happiness I’ve been blessed enough to experience upon you a thousand fold, and if you just came to look at the picture,…well , same to you lazy bastards.

I kid because I love.

But seriously, you are a little lazy. ;)

MORE LOONINESS TO COME!

Note: The amazing photography you see in these pics is courtesy of the killer husband and wife team at Callaway/Gable.

Check their stuff out here! http://www.callawaygable.com/

Engagement Photo Progress!

Like anyone but a handful of people even care! LOL!

But SOME do so,.....on I go! ;)

To tell you the truth,....this engagement photo retouching is the only thing Amazing, Colossal, movie or art related I have right now! Busy year and it's not even mid-February yet!

Besides, the whole purpose of this blog is to keep the artistic gears lubed by drawing animation style stuff from my favorite cartoons and films, right?

No better candidate for that than good ol' Roger Rabbit! Besides,....I love drawing these characters. It's good for my tiny fun-starved soul! :p

Now originally it was just supposed to be Roger, Kelly and I in one or two shots,.....but now, as most projects I seem to take on, it is growing beyond my control.

Jessica,(seen above in this test shot), is now appearing in some of the shots as well as Baby Herman,......later on you may see the likes of Benny the Cab, certain Bunnies and Mice,.....a few penguins perhaps and possibly a rogue flying elephant,.....

Can't help it! Sometimes our art grows beyond even the confines of our minds.

Stay tuned for more "loony selections for a bunch of drunken reprobates", as ol' Judge Doom would say.